Recruitment perks of a premium profile on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is without a doubt the leader in electronic recruiting.

You can seek, target and acquire qualified job candidates without having to wade through loads of unimpressive CVs and desperate job seekers. It’s also easy to integrate with your current recruitment processes.

The number of recruitment agencies using LinkedIn has increased dramatically recently – and it’s no surprise why. What LinkedIn does for recruiters is not just post your job advert, but also provide you with a list of people in the network who match the job’s requirements. With the ability to target job adverts at specific professionals and groups, recruiting has never been so easy or effective.

Premium profile perks

Take your pick from the pool of professionals.

Through LinkedIn’s InMail feature – a benefit of a premium profile – you can send messages directly to any of LinkedIn’s 7 million users, whether they’re potential job candidates, or hiring companies. Why this is special is because you can’t typically email people out of your network.

What’s nifty is that, if the candidate you contacted doesn’t reply within a week, you’re credited for the mail. But never fear, there’s actually quite a high response rate – most of the time people actually do reply, which is unusual for a cold call!

Even more impressive is the ability to take your static database of candidates you’ve been in contact with, and exponentially grow it. Candidates can choose to follow your company, which means that they get notified of every job you post. And you’ll very seldom encounter the typical problem with traditional recruitment databases – outdated CVs.

For every candidate in your database on LinkedIn, they’re connected to other potential candidates, and so on, and so on. And LinkedIn lets you search up to the third degree of connections, so the chances of reaching the right person for the job are that much greater.

On top of all of this, you can also store LinkedIn users’ CVs and details in your database for future reference, and can even save a candidate’s profile as a PDF, or in an organised folder.

Going pro

At its most simplistic, what LinkedIn Premium offers is a database of detailed information (i.e. potential job candidates) and the ability to contact them without having to wait for the ‘right person at the right time’ to walk through your door. It’s a wonder that this ever worked at all!

There are various levels for Premium accounts, depending on how much you’re looking to pay. The benefits are obviously greater at the higher end of the scale – with the Pro account granting you 50 InMails every month.

Although there’s a cost attached to the premium subscription, it’s up to recruiters to weigh the benefits against the cost. It’s not just the ability to contact people that opens up, but search results too.

What most people don’t realise is that the free version of LinkedIn actually limits your search results – to 100 results, and only first, second or third-degree connections. The premium account, depending on the package you choose, opens up to 1,000 finely tuned search results, looking outside of your immediate connections.

You’ll also get alerted by email every time someone who fits your search signs up to LinkedIn, or makes a career change.

The thing that really makes you stop and think is the quality of the companies and job seekers on LinkedIn. How often does a recruiter come across executives and directors? And yet so many of them are on LinkedIn. They may just be there to network, but what better way to get your foot in the company’s recruitment door, than to connect with the head honchos?

The moral of the LinkedIn story is that you get what you pay for. If you want the premium candidates, you most likely need the premium profile. It won’t be necessary for every recruiter out there, the free version might already be just what you need.

You just don’t want to be the company whose only regret is ‘all the ones that got away’.

2 Comments

I use the ‘free’ version of LinkedIn to give myself a professional online prescence and showcase my CV. So this is an opinion on that as I’ve never signed up for Premium. I’ve been able to obtain some great recommendations from people I’ve worked with in the past. I also find it a great source of professional networking, whereas FB is more personnel. In terms of recruitment I think that in general South Africa may still be a bit behind the times. For a start there are only about 5 or 6 SA Job Ad’s on LinkedIn and they’ve been there for a while now. I’ve also had more luck job hunting via more traditional methods of websites like Pnet and Gumtree. When I start using LinkedIn as much as these other websites, then I think that will mean recruiters are using LinkedIn more. I think LinkedIn is the way of the future for recruitment but SA recruiters in general are probably still playing catch up. For an unemployed job seeker they are unlikely to be able to afford to sign up for the premium job seeker service.

LinkedIn is great for people wanting to showcase their talents. As a recruitment channel in South Africa it may be a little premature. For entrepreneurs it is an awesome way to get your skillset out there. And ‘free’ will do just fine for us Saffas.